Dynamic Systems Initiative Update

The Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is Microsoft’s long-term plan to enable its vision of so-called dynamic IT, in which the following occurs:

• Services and applications are decoupled from physical resources, allowing them to be run where they will use physical resources most efficiently, with optimum availability and performance, and without regard to specific makes and models of hardware
• Software automatically discovers hardware and software elements it needs to function and configures all required elements to comply with a configuration policy specified by the customer
• Software automatically senses when something goes wrong and either repairs itself or points IT personnel to the root cause and guides them toward the optimal solution.

To accomplish this vision on the Windows platform, Microsoft has outlined four prerequisites:

Built-in Windows support for hardware virtualization, which will eventually allow applications to be moved from one physical server to another even while running. A first version of this feature is planned for a release after Windows Server 2008.